Meet Ashley Irene of Heirloom Potager

I got to chat with Ashley Irene of Heirloom Potager on the Grow Your Self podcast. Based out of Orange County, she designs bespoke edible culinary gardens. And I have to say, her gardens are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen, starting with her own gorgeous kitchen garden in her front yard.

If you're an OG listener to the podcast, you may remember Ashley from the two times she's been on before, once in the spring of 2020 ("Growing Through Grief") and again in February of 2021 ("Behind the Scenes of Growing a Garden Business”).

We're diving into more of her story today because it's a beautiful story. She's also got lots of tips for gardening in Southern California, but be sure to stick around for her tips on how to grow espalier trees!

(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

What's It Like to Garden in Southern California?

We luck out—we get to grow all four seasons. We've got a variety of microclimates. So we're technically 10b, but we do have a couple of ranges that I would say are more 10a. I actually live in Santa Ana, which is several miles inland from the coast, but then we service clients that are on the coast and they have their own kind of microclimate, which is really cool. We've learned how to cater to those clients, as well.

LA County is right above us, and actually, we just started servicing LA County.

January Through April in Southern California

For me, this time of year with cool, crips nights is about comfort and soups. It's really a time of healing and going back to nature.

January is all about leaves and roots for us. The cool season is my absolute favorite, and it's my favorite for beginner gardeners, as well, because you get immediate success. This is a time when our perennial herbs flourish in our Mediterranean climate.

February and March are kind of similar. The later half of March is when we start putting in our warm season crops. It seems early for other people, but we can sometimes even overwinter tomato varieties in the beds if they're in full sun during our cool season. Then, as soon as our temperatures start warming up in late March or April, they immediately set fruit, and it's just so amazing. We've had really good success with Costoluto Genovese tomatoes, these beautiful and wrinkly Italian heirlooms, so good as a slicer, plus different cherry tomato varieties. We'll also plant new tomatoes at the same time.

As we're transitioning, we'll take out our peas and put in beans. We'll start putting in peppers in full-sun locations because sometimes the nights are still cool. We still get fresh lettuces and things like that, but you start getting to change up your salad. We'll put in our summer squashes, which also like it a bit cooler. They don't like that super intense sun unless they're really healthy, well-fertilized plants.

May Through August in Southern California

As we transition into those warmer months of June and July, we'll start putting in our hot season plants, and then the garden really has to be set for us because it's about to get tough. We don't install gardens anymore between August and October because it's typically too hot. I don't want to discourage anyone and make them think gardening is so much harder than it needs to be. Really, plants just need those extra three or four months of being in the soil to get themselves healthy so they don't die in the heat.

If you come to us in those hot months, we have to push you off till fall. Depending upon our upcoming schedule, we might even have to push you off until the new year.

September Through December in Southern California

Our fall typically looks like the rest of the country's peak summer season. It's just a really fun time, but for our company, we hit the ground running doing installs. We want to start your garden when it's going to be easiest to grow, when you're going to have the most success. We want you to be loving your Heirloom Potager-style life by July.

November is the start of our busiest season. We spend a couple weeks doing garden changeovers to cool season and refreshes for existing clients.

What Made You Decide to Set up a Showcase Garden in Your Front Yard?

It was this kind of wild idea that I had, and my husband said, "This is the best idea you've ever had in your life... or the worst." It's such a great conversational piece, like my neighbors come up and ask questions. People visit from other places. We have a bunch of garden clubs that are going to tour the garden, and we're going to be part of our upcoming neighborhood home tour this spring. It puts a little bit of pressure on me, but also, it's a great place for me to test out ideas, try new varieties, and push my creative boundaries.

My showcase garden was actually on the cover of Orange County Magazine, which was a huge surprise to us. I, unfortunately, was not a subscriber at the time, but my neighbor was. He brought it over across the street. I was on the phone with one of my best friends, and I literally screamed out loud because I had no idea. I knew we were going to be in the magazine. I had no idea that my house was gonna be the cover of a magazine.

My goal now is Better Homes and Gardens. Architectural Digest, when you coming?

Have You Always Been a Garden Pro?

I am a California transplant. I grew up in Wisconsin on my grandmother's farm, and I really thought this was how everybody lived. My grandmother kept an amazing kitchen garden and fed our family, and she practiced intensive planting and companion planting well before I knew that there were terms for it.

As a high school kid, I would have said "Absolutely not, I'm never gonna do this," if someone asked me if gardening would be my career path. I went to an arts charter school for high school, so I have a lot of classical art training. I was discouraged from becoming an artist by my parents, who were worried I wouldn't have a stable income to support myself. They were like, "We don't want you to be a starving artist."

I went to college and studied business. And then I decided to get a Master's degree and study more business. So I feel like I have a really good set up for being an entrepreneur, and then this business allows me to push my creative side.

Why Did You Become a Garden Consultant?

I absolutely love gardening, and I love food and I think food is the way of the future. I am so saddened when I meet high school students who have no idea what a vine-ripened tomato tastes like. We are so disconnected from our food and where our food comes from, how it's grown. Like people don't realize how long it takes to grow that cauliflower that is totally molding in your fruit drawer, you know? Even my husband had no foundation of knowledge. He had a busy working family that bought canned tomatoes and all these other things.

I want to help get people back. I think that's part of why I really try to focus on the culinary aspect. When we design gardens for clients, whether they be residential or commercial clients, one of my questions is: What foods excite you? What's your heritage? Do you want to honor that? Do you want to grow Hungarian peppers because you're Hungarian? What cool plants could we add so you can make family recipes from Croatia?

That's part of where our name came from. I love old things. I live in a historic house. I'm really inspired by old-style castle gardens. And then the idea of a potager is to eat from the garden every day. I want to help people embrace that lifestyle. And I think right now that people are drawn to that. They don't necessarily trust themselves to create it or to have it. They don't realize it's so close to being within their grasp. I want to be able to help bridge that gap for people.

Even a hundred years ago (which is really not that long), we didn't have a lot of the problems that we have created for ourselves. In some regards, the solutions to the biggest problems that we are facing, not only here in America but really globally, are in our history. We just have to be willing to say, "OK, we've advanced far enough. Now, how do we scale it back a little bit? Or how do we advance in ways that actually get us to living better, healthier lives?" 

I just had a conversation with another consultant about this idea of eating wild and how our food we get at the grocery store isn't as nutritious anymore. That's just really frustrating and sad for me. One of the reasons I started Heirloom Potager is because my mom passed away from a long battle with cancer. And yes, there's probably some hereditary things and some dietary things. But it was a symptom of how unhealthy we have become. 

I want our grandkids to grow up in a much healthier environment, where they don't have to worry about getting cancer or getting sick and having a bunch of autoimmune diseases.

Take the idea of regenerative farming. It's totally new to so many people, but it's actually not new methods at all. It's this looking back at the past to fix the future. There's something really beautiful about that.

What's Something You Love to Grow?

I've found that clients are getting really excited about growing more perennials. I have some espaliered apple trees that are a living fence in my front-yard showcase garden. Some people are really shocked that you can get fruit from apple trees in Southern California.

We're getting a lot of requests for orchard installs and perennials. I love inspiring people to grow things that are going to be in their landscape for a while. They're usually high production, like blueberries, and they'll taste a lot different than what you buy at the store. For clients with kids or even our empty nesters, it's all about that entertainment value, like "Look at my cool landscape and these beautiful trees. Have you ever seen trees like this before?"

We're lucky enough to have our own nursery, so we're actually starting to do some multi-grafted varieties of espalier trees because they're hard to find and if you do find them in Orange County, they can be a good investment.

Ashley's Tips for Growing Espalier Trees

Tip #1: Pay Attention to Chill Hours

The secret for us is picking the right variety of fruit trees, specifically ones with low chill hours (under 200 hours since we don't actually ever get a frost). Chill hours are hours below 45°F—fridge-like, but not freezing. Some fruit tree varieties like an actual hard frost to help them produce really great fruit. If your trees don't get enough chill hours, you typically don't get fruit production.

Unfortunately, big box stores don't care about this. My clients will go to there and say, "Fruit trees for $15? I'm going to stock up instead of paying $300 for yours!" I'm like, "Yeah, that's a 600 chill-hour variety. It's going to struggle here, and then you're going to become discouraged."

Tip #2: Use a Support Structure to Trellis the Trees

We built a structure for my espalier trees. We worked with a local forger who created some really cool, beautiful posts to go between a tension wire fence.

Tip #3: Prune

We just started offering a pruning and fertilizing service for our clients every season, which has been a really cool way to grow the business.

The first thing to look for when you're pruning are branches that are growing outward or crossing. You also want to thin out. The key to production on an espalier tree, particularly an apple, is to focus on those short branches. Anything that's super tall is most likely going to be a water spout, and you want to cut those off because they're just sucking up a lot of energy and sugars from your tree. Remove those and any branches that aren't growing on a flat plane.

Keep branches that are part of a specific design or structure that you're after. So if we want a tree to grow to another level, we'll pick the two strongest branches growing upward to keep and then train them up by slowly bending them. We've created beautiful fan shapes from ugly trees on discount at a local nursery.

Less is more with an espalier tree. That's hard for me to say because I'm a maximalist gardener—that's my aesthetic. But that's what's going to get you the style, shape, and fruit production you want.

Tip #4: Make the Most of a Small Space

You can definitely make the most of small spaces with espalier trees. If you want a beautiful driveway, just pick a variety that doesn't have roots that would disturb your concrete or anything like that. How cool would that be to have something you can share with your neighbor or just bring a smile to your face when you come home?

Tip #5: Remove the Fruit the First Year

Most trees from the nursery are 2 to 3 years old and should actually be ready to start producing fruit. We do recommend to our clients that they take the fruit off the first year after planting. The reason is because we want that tree to be as successful as possible. Removing the first fruits allows the plant to send all of that energy to building the healthiest root system possible, plus stronger branches so that it can actually hold a decent amount of fruit.

The year after that, you can enjoy your harvests and have the most delicious, juicy nectarines and peaches and apricots and apples!

What's It Like to Work as a Garden Consultant?

This is such a great job. It gets me out of an office. It gets me interacting with people. I had somebody really close to me ask me: "Even on your worst days, does going to work make you happy?" And without missing a beat, I said, "Absolutely." I love what I do. I love the fact that every day doesn't always look the same. And I love the joy that we get to bring.

That was my mom's dream for me. When we knew that her time here on Earth was coming to an end, she said, "I want you to do something joyful, something that brings joy to the world." And at the time, I was a branding consultant, and I thought, "Well, I do," and she was like, "Do you?" And it really hit me.

And so in this case, yeah, I bring joy to the world. I get to watch the children and even the grandparents of the clients we work with pull a carrot out of the ground. There is nothing more exciting than pulling a carrot out of the ground. And I know it sounds silly, but at the same time, it's just fun and encourages me to keep going.

I'm really thankful and grateful and happy. And I love being able to see other people's success. This is a profession that can change the world. I want to change my immediate community, and then I want to go bigger. I want to one day design a culinary garden in Europe. I want to work with some really cool chefs from other countries who have a different approach or philosophy to cooking. 

Food is at the heart of what we do because that's how we show love to the world. I want to do that for the client and partner with them and build their confidence. 

Another consultant said to me, "Girl, you have the ability to build an entire empire," and I was like, "Oh, that sounds a little intimidating." And then I was like, "But wait, I get to do that on my terms." I can be somebody who can inspire others and continue learning from others and then also employ really good people. I want to shift it so that it's not a job—it's something joyful that they get to do. That is something that makes me feel like my time here on Earth will be a worthwhile adventure.

Follow Ashley & Maybe Start Your Own Showcase Garden Right in Your Front Yard!

Ashely is well on her way to changing the world. She's definitely bringing joy to her clients and those of us who follow her.

You can follow Heirloom Potager on Instagram and visit their website. Ashley is your woman if you're in Orange County or LA County and want a beautiful edible garden.

It's been an honor to be a small part of Ashley's big dream, and I love following her and learning from her. Now, I'm going to go find a spot for my first espalier tree.

Photo credits to Ashley Irene and Nicole Kent.